Baby name near-misses

I was looking through an old backpack during my recent basement renovation, and an index card fell out with a list of labor contraction times, and our short list of baby names — the last time I used it was the birth of my first son. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks, and talked to my wife about our baby name choices last night.

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What are you looking at — you named your kids Scout and Jem.

“Did we really almost name our son Atticus?”

Atticus is definitely my No. 1 baby name near-miss. While we considered several names that I no longer like before settling on Theo and Milo, Atticus made it to the final three for our firstborn. I think about this fact the same way I think about the time I went rock climbing with a crazy friend in the early 1990s, and reached the top of a 20-foot face only to discover that three of the four pitons and camming devices he had set had fallen out. But for the grace of God …

Nothing against Atticus. I don’t dislike the name for a family that’s considerably more badass than mine. Mike Tyson could name his son Atticus. Ron Perlman could have a son named Atticus as well. But even though my wife is a high school English teacher and I’m sort of a writer, I’m completely certain now that we couldn’t have pulled it off. It would have seemed pretentious. (For one thing, I dropped out of law school …) And as he grows up, he’s way into mechanical things, and actually pretty weak at crafting solid arguments. He may prove me wrong, but I’m definitely thinking he’s more of an engineer than an attorney.

We had other near-misses, depending on who you ask. I had jokingly wanted to name my first son Roscoe, and very seriously wanted to name the second one Otis — which would have been awesome, because he definitely looks like an Otis. My wife wanted Gus as the name for our second son, which I wasn’t especially excited about. (When he came out, we both agreed he didn’t look like a Gus, and ended up pulling Milo from our B list of names.)

Did you have any names you were close to picking, that in hindsight you’re really glad you didn’t choose? What are your baby name near-misses?

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes has nothing to do with parenting. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub.